Чарли Андерс - Six Months, Three Days, Five Others

“Hey Rock,” Ricky said. I was up to about ten percent accuracy with my lipreading. He held out his hand, and I took it out of reflex.

We all went for burgers at this little diner nearby, which had survived everything without changing its greasy ways. I admired that. It even had a little jukebox at each table, and the red checkered vinyl tablecloth with stray burn marks from when you could still smoke indoors. Ricky smoked, because who was going to tell him not to?

“i think it’s great you’re still doing the same thing as in high school,” Ricky’s laptop screen said. He swiveled it around and typed some more, then turned it back. Now it said: “you found something that worked for you, and you stuck with it. that’s kool.” I nodded. If Ricky had been talking instead of typing, he probably would have made this stuff sound like compliments. He typed some more: “you know i always liked you.” The other two guys didn’t try to say anything, or even read what Ricky was typing; they just ate their burgers and stared out the window at the handfuls of students who were crawling back to Harvard.

I didn’t try to contribute to the conversation either, I just read whatever Ricky typed. He hadn’t touched his burger yet. He told me about how he’d moved up in the world since high school, and now he was working for some pretty juiced-up people in government, and everything was really under control. You would be surprised, he said, at how under control everything was.

I nodded and half-smiled, to show that I knew what he meant, but really I didn’t think I would be that surprised.

I thought about the oar that had gotten away from me, floating downriver toward freedom, as fast as it could go. Where would it end up?

Ricky said I shouldn’t worry about a repeat of what happened last time. We were both older and more experienced, and he’d gotten smarter since then. But the thing was, he said, people were still in shock—almost like little children, right now. And they needed their cartoony entertainment to keep their minds off things. So here was the deal: he would get us resources—resources like we couldn’t imagine, like our wildest dreams were this tablecloth and the actuality was up there on the ceiling. And in return, we would just portray authority in a kind way. Nothing too heavy, like everyone wearing the bandana or any army uniforms or anything. Just occasionally we see that the militia and Army are trustworthy, and the people in charge have everyone’s best interests at heart, etc. Most of the time, we’d have a free hand.

I had to get up and go wash my hands so I could type on Ricky’s laptop. I didn’t want to get his keyboard greasy. Then it took me a minute to hunt and peck: “sally wont go for it she thinks you killed her boyfriend which duh you did.”

I swiveled it around before I could think twice about what I’d just typed.

Ricky’s eyes narrowed. He looked up at me, and for a moment he was the legbreaker again. I thought he was going to lunge across the booth and throttle me. Then he typed: “the robot guy?” I nodded. “that was a situation. its complicated, and many people were to blame.”

I tried really really hard not to have any expression on my face, as if it didn’t matter to me one way or the other. I ran out of hamburger, so I ate my fries slow, skinning them and then nibbling at the mashed potatoes inside. Everything smelled meaty.

“tell u what, just dont tell sally im involved,” Ricky typed. “just tell her the government wants 2 support your work.”

It was easy for me to agree to that, because I knew my face was a giant cartoon emoticon as far as Sally was concerned, and she would know within seconds that I was hiding something.

Ricky didn’t threaten to break parts of us if we didn’t go along with his plan, but he didn’t need to, and he only made some gauzy promises about payment. He did say he could get me some rowing lessons.

It took me two hours to find Sally. I almost texted her, but I had a bad feeling about my cell phone.

She was in a group of film students building a giant ramp that looked as if they were going to roll a mail cart into a snowbank. She saw me and then turned away to watch her pals slamming boards together. I nudged her, but she just ignored me. I remembered she’d said something about this movie they wanted to make about a guy who works in the mailroom and discovers a hidden doorway that leads to Hell’s interoffice mail system, and he has to deliver a bunch of letters to demons before he can get out. High fuckin’ concept. Anyway, she was pissed that I’d been blowing her off for weeks, so now I couldn’t get her attention.

Finally, I wrote just the name “ricky a” on my cell and shoved it in front of her without pressing send. Her eyes widened, and she made to text me back, but I stopped her. I grabbed a pad and a pen and wrote down the whole story for her, including the signs in Harvard Square. She shook her head a lot, then bit her lip. She thought I was exaggerating, but the guy who’d seen the signs showed up and confirmed that part.

“We’re so small time,” she wrote in neat cursive under my scrawls. “Why would Ricky care?”

Under that, I wrote: “1. He remembers us from hi skool, unfinished biz. 2. He likes us and wants to own us. 3. He hates us and wants to destroy us. 4. those guys are scared of losing their grip & they think we can help.”

It was a cold day, and I’d gotten kind of wet trying to escape in a Harvard boat, plus the sun was going down, so I started to shiver out there on the lawn in front of BU. Some students were straggling back in, just like at Harvard, and they stared at the set, abandoned half-finished against one wall. Sally gestured for her gang to get the ramp to Hell’s mailroom back into storage.

We piled ourselves into the back of the equipment van, with Zapp Stillman driving, and headed for the Turnpike, because the sooner we got out of town the better.

We got about half a mile before we hit the first checkpoint. There were soldiers with big dragonfly helmets standing in front of humvees, blocking off most of the lanes of Storrow Drive, and between the soldiers and the swiveling cameras on stalks, there was no way you would get past their makeshift barricades. They were checking everybody coming in and out of the city, and a hundred yards past them stood an exoskeleton thingy, or a mecha or whatever they call it, with thighs like Buicks and feet like dumpsters. I couldn’t really see its top half from my hiding place in the back of the van, but I imagined piston elbows and some kind of skull face. The kind of people who built a mech like this would not be able to resist having a skull face. My brother Holman had probably piloted one of these things in Central Asia or Central Eurasia, someplace Central. The pilots of these things had a high rate of going A.U.T.U., because of all the neural strain. This one wasn’t moving, but it was cranked up and operational because you could see the ground shivering around it, and there were fresh kills nearby: Cars still smoking, a few unlucky bodies.

Our van turned onto a side street as fast as possible, and we swerved back toward Boston University. By the time we got back there, Janelle had found some forum posts about the cordoning off of several major cities. It was part of a sweep to round up certain radical elements that threatened the shaky order: you had the red bandanas inside the cities, and the army outside.

We were still in the van, parked on a side street just off Dummer St., sheltered by a giant sad oak that leaned almost to the ground on one side. You could put a tire swing on that oak and swing underground and maybe there would be mole people. Mole people would be awesome, especially if they had their own dance routine, which I just figured they probably would because what else would you be doing stuck underground all the time?